Binary Encoding of Data Types

Binary encoding represents information in an optimized binary format on memory or disk. This section covers how different data types are encoded and stored on disk.

Primitive types

This section discusses the encoding format of different primitive types.

Numeric digits without a decimal point

Numeric types without a decimal point, such as integer and long, are first converted into their corresponding binary values in 0s and 1s. Integer values occupy 4 bytes, and long values occupy 8 bytes. Then, the endianness dictates the order of sequencing multiple bytes of a given binary representation in the memory or disk.

There are two types of endianness:

• Little-endian: A little-endian system first stores the least significant byte of the value, followed by the most significant byte.

• Big-endian: A big-endian system first stores the most significant byte of the value, followed by the least significant byte.

The illustration below provides an example method of checking the endianness of the machine: